Black Friday & Cyber Monday Strategies For Ecommerce Marketing

Are you excited about the busiest season for eCommerce marketing? Or are you a little nervous? Don’t worry; we’ve got your back. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are arguably some of the most sought out shopping weekends. Every marketer out there is gonna put up a tough battle to dominate in the ad and inbox space. Tweaking your eCommerce strategies for this period will be your best bet to reach your sales goals.

The strategies put in place for everyday sales are not what you need for these weeks. With a higher than average traffic expected you need to roll out strategies that can utilize the high traffic and attract most of them to your business.

No matter which industry you are in, missing out on the sales potential of these weeks is a big opportunity wasted. Your Ecommerce marketing team shouldn’t take a backseat in this period or else your competitors will make the most of it.

This guide will help you with strategies that can take advantage of the great opportunities that lie ahead.

1. Planning Sales And Discounts 

An estimated 25% of shoppers initiate their shopping before the holidays even start. This means you can’t just take it slow and instead start your preparations in advance as well. Time the discounts right but also ensure these efforts follow a solid purpose.

Do not pursue strategies on an impulse as this can cripple your income and might even result in losses. They require a thorough analysis and planning so that you won’t bite more than you can chew. Track data regarding the product’s normal price vs discounted price.

Monitor such relevant aspects of your eCommerce store if you do not wish your margins to come to a steady decline. Inventory management is very crucial, remember that the primary purpose is not stock clearance.

The idea of limited discount times or limited discount pieces is for improving the momentum of the sales. Even if the products and services are sold at discounted prices it will bring a boost to the revenue made.

Mix things up by throwing in a wide range of discounts for your products. People are more likely to be curious about what sort of new discounts are available. This will work in your favor as your potential customers could take initiative and check your business by themselves.

The right discount strategies can be found when you implement different types of discounts. This way the suitable discounts can be found that are effective for your campaign. Take this info to decide which discount strategies to abandon or implement in the future.

2. Website Performance

Have you checked your website performance lately? Even if it shows no signs of lag it will undergo severe strain during events such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday. This is because there will be more traffic and can overload your servers.

The website needs to be optimized to ensure it can handle the traffic surge on those days. Otherwise, the site will freeze or crash and have the customers abandon the website. This will negatively affect the customer experience and hurt your credibility.

This is why you need to test out your website to its fullest before the eventful days. Black Fridays are meant to utilize the boost in conversion rates. You wouldn’t want to end up having a boost in bounce rates instead because of poor website performance.

People are merry during holiday seasons and will not be in the mood for slow websites. Each second counts in terms of loading speed, you can potentially lose a major chunk of traffic if your website takes too many seconds to load.

Try to eliminate all the unnecessary plugins or javascript and keep it to a minimum for better loading speeds.

3. Simpler Checkout 

A great way to obtain better conversion rates would be to have a streamlined checkout process. Making the checkout process complex will leave your customers frustrated. The entire operation is wasted if the customers don’t make it past the finishing line which is the checkout.

Time of holiday does not essentially mean customers are willing to take more time in the checkout process. During Black Fridays or Cyber Mondays, you can find people to be in a hurry to complete their purchases.

If you do not utilize this sense of urgency they could change their mind and lose interest. Avoid the time-consuming operation that can hinder the checkout process. Provide the customer with one-click payment methods like Google pay, Paypal, etc.

Inefficient methods for check out can lead to cart abandonment. Therefore you will need to ensure your customers do not go through a long and slow checkout process. Even if people do abandon carts, they use automated cart abandonment notifications to pursue valuable leads.

Let the checkout page be limited to a single page for a simpler process. The more payment methods the page offers the better it caters to a wider audience.

4. Advertisements

Advertisements on Black Friday and Cyber Monday are known to bring great returns. Hence making investments for the advertising campaign is not a bad place to start to gain momentum for your business.

It might seem like a bad strategy to bother your customers with advertisements but you need to factor in the occasion at hand. Black Friday already is a chaotic period of sales so people already expect chaos and you are free to contribute to it with dynamic advertisements.

Advertisers around the world spend almost twice as much on Black Friday advertising than the overall pre-holiday period. This is supported by the fact that sales reach a whopping 348% on Black Friday compared to any other regular day in October.

Plan the advertising campaigns well ahead and continue making changes and improving them every year. Make use of all the channels available that have good potential to boost your campaign. Social media can also be used as a channel for advertisements.

Social media may not be the best platform if you are trying to create purchase intent. But at the same time, it is very useful if you want your campaign to get a wider reach. Advertisements like Facebook and Instagram ads, emails, social media posts, etc are a good place to start.

5. Analysis

Success or failure is not the end of the ecommerce marketing campaign, you will need to conduct a thorough analysis of the metrics to improve it. You need to pursue streamlined solutions for analyzing the campaigns to ensure consistent future successes.

Analyze all the information and all the relevant aspects to track them and stay updated regarding them. Data from previous years is a great source of information about the possible areas where your campaign could be lacking.

This way you can examine the operations which didn’t bring you your expected returns. Carefully monitor the conversion rates on Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays. This gives you room to see if the methods you employed in that period were fruitful to the cause.

Analyzing these metrics will help you decide which strategies to abandon and which strategies to enforce. After knowing these key factors you can also determine which new strategies you can implement in the coming years.

Conclusion

With the following eCommerce marketing strategies, you can gear up for the holiday season to hit that sales target you have in mind. Although don’t get too cozy just because it’s the holidays as you need to start your preparation weeks or perhaps months before it.

Our team at Growth Natives can help you pursue the right methods which can reach your targeted number of sales or even exceed those numbers.